Digital Economy Bill

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 6th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 82. This Bill is an opportunity possibly to enhance the lives of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people in our society. The words of our Prime Minister always come to mind:

“a country that works for everyone”.

This amendment will help the country work for everyone. Currently, the parent of a child wishing to have a free school meal must apply for it. Not only does that provide a free school meal, which is hugely important for children because hungry children are not good learners, but it ensures that the school gets a pupil premium—a substantial sum of money—to help those disadvantaged pupils.

This simple amendment would ensure that local authorities automatically enrol those entitled to receive free school meals. Local authorities currently administer a number of benefits, such as council tax and housing benefit, so they are aware of families that would be eligible to claim free meals and would automatically contact the school. This would ensure that parents who, for a host of reasons, fail to claim would be able to do so.

It is estimated that a family with a child receiving free school meals can save up to £400 a year. Noble Lords may imagine that if the parents have more than one child the saving is quite substantial. As well as the family saving money and the child getting a free school meal it ensures that the school gets a substantial amount of money—the pupil premium—to help disadvantaged pupils.

The Minister will probably reply—as did the Minister from the other place—that the department’s own electronic eligibility checking system means that the clause is not really needed. That, however, is only a system which enables a school to check whether the parent is on the free meals register: it has speeded up the process but does not do the job that this amendment hopes to do.

I make a further point about this, at a time when we are all sensitive about the amount of private data that circulates: there is perhaps a fear that leads people to question why schools should have private data on pupils entitled to free meals. For that reason the amendment clearly states that parents will be notified before this information is made available and that there will be opt-out arrangements. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will be sympathetic to this very important amendment.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend. I support his Amendment 82 and shall speak to Amendment 92, which is in a similar vein but relates to the warm home discount. I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, who have other duties in the House and would otherwise be here.

It is my pleasure to speak to Amendment 92, which seeks to test the possibilities that Clauses 30 to 32 open up. For years I have been banging away at the Department for Work and Pensions to make proper and better beneficial use, in terms of client well-being, of the vast amount of data that it has on families. That, together with the data held by HMRC, and particularly the data generated when universal credit comes in, will give the Government as a whole immensely enhanced abilities to promote well-being, particularly in our low-income households. I warmly welcome Clauses 30 to 32.

I am listening carefully and correctly to some of the interrogation that is being properly directed at the Government, because we have to get this right; it is very important that the protections are there. Subject to those protections, I am an enthusiast for making use of these provisions. I am slightly surprised that there have not been more attempts—like mine and that of my noble friend—to prise open new opportunities as the Bill goes through. This amendment tries to test the willingness, enthusiasm and ingenuity of Ministers in seeing how they can expand public services to our citizens under Clauses 30 to 32.

Amendment 92 simply seeks to improve the use of data-sharing powers to extend the reach of the warm home discount. The provenance of this amendment is work that I have been doing over months and years for the Children’s Society, and I acknowledge and pay tribute to the work it does with families, particularly with children in fuel-poor households. The Children’s Society has been making the argument to me about the importance and urgency of getting the issue of fuel poverty dealt with more adequately. We need only look at the announcement from npower last week, and indeed some of the wider economic indicators that are showing that this group of fuel-poor households is likely to find things getting a lot worse before they get any better. We need to pay attention to that.

I am told by the Children’s Society that, according to the Government’s own figures, families with children are now the biggest group affected by fuel poverty: 45% of households that can claim the warm home discount are now families with children under 18. The Children’s Society has some valuable survey evidence of a project that it carried out in Bradford and in other places, which indicates clearly the distress caused by fuel poverty. For instance, there is the fact that parents in these households are frightened to turn up the heating in cold winter months because they fear the level of the increased bills it would occasion. Some of those same parents believe that their children’s health is potentially affected by not doing so, so it is a real concern for the parents involved.